Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/469

ON FLOATING IDEAS AND THE IMAGINAEY. 455- and beyond this subject we have always a region taken in some sense to be real. And the idea, which is repelled from the subject, falls within this other world and qualifies it.- I do not mean that in all negation the alternative is dis- tinct. 1 The alternative on the contrary may be unspecified in various degrees. Our other world may amount to no- more than that vague residue which remains after the subject has been selected. But, however undefined this other may- be, it is the region into which the banished idea is sent. The idea never floats, like Mabomet's coffin, between both worlds, or somehow hangs nowhere. And the idea once- more belongs to and qualifies that world which it inhabits. I do not mean that the idea, when repelled from one subject^, must be predicated of another subject. Predication, we have seen above, is not asserted wherever floating ideas are denied (p. 449). The union of the repelled idea with the other world may be no more than a coalescence in feeling and in various, degrees may be immediate. But this union, we have seen, is a qualification and amounts to a bond. And with this- summary result I must pass from the claim of floating ideas to exist in negation. 1 See above. 2 1 will deal briefly and in passing with several difficulties, (i.) Where the subject, from which the idea is repelled, is the Universe at large, it- may be objected that we have no longer here a distinction taken within reality. The answer is that here the Universe as a whole is distinguished from its own partial contents. What we deny is that the idea, which qualifies a finite sphere within the Whole, is in the same sense true of the Whole. But obviously I cannot here discuss the difficulties which in the end beset the general doctrine of truth and the ultimate distinction of subject and predicate, (ii.) It may be asked how the idea of ' nothing *" can qualify reality. I answer, as before, in general that exclusion from the Universe admits presence in a field of distinction falling within the Universe. And I answer further that ' nothing,' being always relative, can always qualify such a field. If there were a genuine idea of sheer nothing, the case would be altered. But without entering into further- difficulties and into refinements for which there is no space, I may state broadly that this is impossible. We cannot have a consistent idea of nothingness if that is made absolute, (iii.) But I may be asked further how an idea, if self-contradictory, can qualify the real, and whether- therefore, in asserting that all ideas qualify reality, I am not in conflict with the Law of Contradiction. The question is interesting, and to my- self it is even more interesting when followed by another, How when self-contradictory ideas in some sense exist (as is allowed to be the case), is it possible that such ideas should not in some sense qualify the real ? Such questions cannot however be properly discussed apart from an in- quiry into the ultimate meaning of contradiction. I have undertaken this inquiry elsewhere (Appearance and MIND, No. 20, p. 482), and must here be allowed to take the result reached by it as true. And resting on this basis I reply as follows to the objection just raised. The self- contradictory, as it anywhere qualifies the real, is taken so far not to